Racist medical myths persist with SA’s diseased apartheid mentality

It is quite easy to prove that the prevalence of TB in the Western Cape has nothing to do with colouredness and everything to do with the poor living conditions of people within a particular geography. Image: David Lurie

More than a century of racist indoctrination has created in the minds and hearts of ordinary South Africans something those in the social sciences call racial essentialism - the belief that there is something in the essence of being African or Indian (etc.) that explains certain attitudes, aptitudes, beliefs, behaviours and, of course, diseases.

And as we saw in a recent study on “cognitive functioning in Coloured South African women”, racist medical mythologies are still being perpetuated.